When Googlebot crawls a page, it should see the page the same way an average user does15. For optimal rendering and indexing, always allow Googlebot access to the JavaScript, CSS, and image files used by your website. If your site's robots.txt file disallows crawling of these assets, it directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content. This can result in suboptimal rankings.
Thanks Brian for your article. I am in the healthy living niche. I want to team up with bloggers in my own niche where we can share material it makes sense to me. But I have my own unique message and that is what I have been devoted to! Dah! I see now that my focus should be on what is popular among my peers and add to this. I think I’m finally getting the picture! I am specifically into FOOD MEDICINE perhaps I should start writting about the dangers of a Gluten free diet! Not for everyone!

Not all strategies have to be big. Sometimes your window is small, and you're forced to build for a distinct — or tiny — opportunity. Maybe you don't have time for a proper large-scale strategy at all; a tactic or two might be all you can do to carry in a win. Just make that very clear with your boss or client. Don't misrepresent what you're trying to build as an SEO campaign.

Hey Brian, I have landed in this blog while visiting via blog land. I must appreciate your effort to put up such informative content. As being an Internet Marketing Consultant, I would like to add few thought of my own with your valuable content. There are many people who wants HUGE number of traffic with no time at all. But as per my experience, SEO has become SLOW-BUT-STEADY process in the recent times. After so many algorithm updates of Google, I think if we will do any wrong things with the websites, that should be paid off. So without taking any risk, we need to work ethically so that slowly the website will get the authority and grab the targeting traffic. What do you think mate? I am eagerly looking forward to your reply and love to see more valuable write-ups from your side. Why don’t you write about some important points about Hummingbird Updates of Google. It will be a good read. Right brother? 🙂

If you create content that people enjoy it can easily become popular or even go viral. The important thing is to put your website and content in front of people that are looking for it, right? Social bookmarking is a super easy way to do just that. Social bookmarking sites allow users to bookmark their favorite websites that other people can publicly view and vote up or down. If you bookmark useful content other people will find it, share it, and vote it up so others can enjoy it. Oh yeah, and it only takes about 30 seconds to bookmark your site. The 3 most popular social bookmarking sites are Digg, Reddit, and Delicious. These 3 sites get over 8 MILLION unique visitors a month – funneling off a chunk of that traffic to your website is very doable. (There’s plenty to go around ) Just remember to create content that people will enjoy and/or find useful. The most popular content on social bookmarking sites are usually check lists, “Top 10” lists, tools & resources, and breaking news – so keep that in mind!

Hi Brian! Very good and exactly what I was looking for. I have a problem though, we are creating the first video editing software that edits video WHILE FILMING. We are video geeks with a lot of experience, however we are trying to appeal to GoPro users and video tutorial makers but we have little knowledge in that field. Any suggestions on how we write about that if we have no idea about the space?
SEO often involves improving the quality of the content, ensuring that it is rich in relevant keywords and organizing it by using subheads, bullet points, and bold and italic characters. SEO also ensures that the site’s HTML is optimized such that a search engine can determine what is on the page and display it as a search result in relevant searches. These standards involve the use of metadata, including the title tag and meta description. Cross linking within the website is also important.

Not all strategies have to be big. Sometimes your window is small, and you're forced to build for a distinct — or tiny — opportunity. Maybe you don't have time for a proper large-scale strategy at all; a tactic or two might be all you can do to carry in a win. Just make that very clear with your boss or client. Don't misrepresent what you're trying to build as an SEO campaign.

You should build a website to benefit your users, and any optimization should be geared toward making the user experience better. One of those users is a search engine, which helps other users discover your content. Search Engine Optimization is about helping search engines understand and present content. Your site may be smaller or larger than our example site and offer vastly different content, but the optimization topics we discuss below should apply to sites of all sizes and types. We hope our guide gives you some fresh ideas on how to improve your website, and we'd love to hear your questions, feedback, and success stories in the Google Webmaster Help Forum1.

Attempting to replace a dead link with your own is easily and routinely identified as spam by the Wikipedia community, which expects dead links to be replaced to equivalent links at archive.org. Persistent attempts will quickly get your account blocked, and your webiste can be blacklisted (the Wikipedia blacklist is public, and there is evidence that Google uses it to determine rankings), which will have negative SEO consequences.

Social media is one of the most popular free marketing tools around, and plays a role in driving traffic to your website. Use Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to promote blog posts and other useful pages on your website. This way you can turn your social media audience into website visitors, and draw traffic from their networks if you post shareable content.
Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences, webchats, and seminars. Major search engines provide information and guidelines to help with website optimization.[18][19] Google has a Sitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website.[20] Bing Webmaster Tools provides a way for webmasters to submit a sitemap and web feeds, allows users to determine the "crawl rate", and track the web pages index status.
I love your post. I keep coming back because you always have great content I can use in my business as well as share. Since I own my own Digital Marketing company I guess you would be one of THE influencers in Internet Marketing field. I just started my business and because most influencers on twitter are talking about Content Marketing, that is what I have been writing about. But my site is only about a month old so I will just stay consistent in my writing. I’m also in the process of changing my navigation bar so be know how to get to what they want faster. Which would be “what is SEO”, etc. Thanks and would love any advice you can give me.
By relying so much on factors such as keyword density which were exclusively within a webmaster's control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. This meant moving away from heavy reliance on term density to a more holistic process for scoring semantic signals.[13] Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, poor quality or irrelevant search results could lead users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate. In 2005, an annual conference, AIRWeb (Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web), was created to bring together practitioners and researchers concerned with search engine optimization and related topics.[14]
This is excellent and should be intuitive for marketers (and SEO pros are marketers!) but we often take the short cut and neglect critical details. What would also reinforce the strategy is way of providing solid projections for SEO (these could be based on industry trends and statistics). Clients now ask for ways to calculate ROI and they need numbers to get budget approvals. Increase in traffic by X, increase in qualified traffic and leads, conversions etc, some way of quatifying the expected return.
Brian, I recently found your blog by following OKDork.com. Just want to say you’re really amazing with the content you put out here. It’s so helpful, especially for someone like me who is just starting out. I’m currently writing posts for a blog I plan to launch later this year. I think my niche is a little too broad and I have to figure out how to narrow it down. I essentially want to write about my current journey of overcoming my fears to start accomplishing the dreams i have for blogging, business, and travel. In doing so, I will share the best tips, tools, and tactics I can find, as well as what worked, what didn’t and why.

This post has been so helpful. It took me over an hour to read because I kept jotting down notes and getting lost in a loop of researching some points on google, haha. You always have such great in depth articles that really help me out as a new blogger. I have a small list of bloggers I follow for advice on blogging, but Twins Mommy is my favorite.

Hi Brain, I am a young business owner who has had 4 different websites in the last 2 years but none of them were successful as I would have liked due to lack of SEO. Now I am in process of starting another business and I felt it was time for me to learn about SEO myself. I must say the information you have provided is invaluable and extremely helpful!! I am learning on the go and you are my biggest contributor. Thank you Sir!
i just kind the amazing article like this.. i have been read much article all about SEO but not like this.. i spent 2 hours more to read this article over and over. i have been checklist to get your tips. and also i have follow your twiiter 🙂 , i hope you are always send me tips and trick for amazing SEO.. i want to learn with you.. Thanks Very Much Brian.. Keep Share for me 🙂 , Cheers
Give customers the ways with which they can access the translated version of your website easily. And if they are not able to execute that, then they will bounce without engaging. You can integrate the ‘hreflang” attribute to the website’s code and assure that the adequately translated version of the website appears in the search engines. Yandex and Google highly recognize it.

Hi! I really found this article to be valuable and helpful to improve our SEO techniques. But I am just wondering regarding the dead links, does that mean we can contact those who have dead links to recreate the page? How does it improve my SEO technique for my website? Can they add some citations or thank you or gratitude section that links to our website?

Optimization techniques are highly tuned to the dominant search engines in the target market. The search engines' market shares vary from market to market, as does competition. In 2003, Danny Sullivan stated that Google represented about 75% of all searches.[64] In markets outside the United States, Google's share is often larger, and Google remains the dominant search engine worldwide as of 2007.[65] As of 2006, Google had an 85–90% market share in Germany.[66] While there were hundreds of SEO firms in the US at that time, there were only about five in Germany.[66] As of June 2008, the market share of Google in the UK was close to 90% according to Hitwise.[67] That market share is achieved in a number of countries.
Keywords. Keyword research is the first step to a successful SEO strategy. Those successful with SEO understand what people are searching for when discovering their business in a search engine. These are the keywords they use to drive targeted traffic to their products. Start brainstorming potential keywords, and see how the competition looks by using Google AdWords Keyword Tool. If you notice that some keywords are too competitive in your niche, go with long-tail keywords (between two and five words) which will be easier for you to rank. The longer the keyword, the less competition you will have for that phrase in the engines.
Structured data21 is code that you can add to your sites' pages to describe your content to search engines, so they can better understand what's on your pages. Search engines can use this understanding to display your content in useful (and eye-catching!) ways in search results. That, in turn, can help you attract just the right kind of customers for your business.
Hey Brian, I have landed in this blog while visiting via blog land. I must appreciate your effort to put up such informative content. As being an Internet Marketing Consultant, I would like to add few thought of my own with your valuable content. There are many people who wants HUGE number of traffic with no time at all. But as per my experience, SEO has become SLOW-BUT-STEADY process in the recent times. After so many algorithm updates of Google, I think if we will do any wrong things with the websites, that should be paid off. So without taking any risk, we need to work ethically so that slowly the website will get the authority and grab the targeting traffic. What do you think mate? I am eagerly looking forward to your reply and love to see more valuable write-ups from your side. Why don’t you write about some important points about Hummingbird Updates of Google. It will be a good read. Right brother? 🙂